It is all about the latest equipment and techniques, new adventures and places to travel, learning from the best or the mistakes they have made along the way, and great outdoor stories.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Ueli Gegenschatz soars in a wingsuit

In this TED talk Ueli Gegenschatz talks about his favourite hobbies, most of which involve jumping off anything from a balloon, a moving truck on a high bridge, and he has even parachuted off the Eiffel Tower. He talks about several different styles and fun things he’s done, he talks about starting from just straight sky diving, he then eventually moves to sky surfing which was sky diving with a board attached to his feet which he used to do spins, (this was my personal favourite because I snow board and have always thought about this type of thing) the final thing he talked about was a “Wingsuit” which is a suit that is made with a patch of fabric that webs the arms to the side of the body and another piece between the legs. With this he can fly through the air and control his flight path. The end the talk and presents a video of himself flying through the air. He goes on to talk about how he hopes one day that the Wingsuit will be able to land without the assistant of a parachute.

2 comments:

When I watched this Ted talk about Ueli Gegenschatz talking about his wing suit I thought it was boss that he was doing Ariel acrobats. While watching it I happened to notice that he was jumping off some weird stuff like the moving truck from a highway, he is a mad man is what ran through my mind, I think he was also very lucky to jump off of the Eiffel Tower. It was also cool that he said he wanted to set a world record "for longest distance flown with a wing suit", he then proceeds to show us a video of him fly in his wing suit, I enjoyed watching the video because I have never seen this before and I have thoughts about doing this someday.

I watched Ueli Gegenschatz on a Ted talk. He talked about his hobby. It was jumping off moving objects and stationary ones. When i started to watch this i thought it was very interesting. He talked about a variety of different styles for sky diving. Wing suit jumping was his main topic. The wing suit was like a normal sky diving suit, only it had fabric "wings" under each arm and in between his legs.

I thought he was very inspirational because he has accomplished all of this so far, but that is still not enough for him. He has a dream to make a world record for the longest flight and make a jump that no one has ever made before.